"The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" by David Mitchell

Art WinslowSpecial to the Tribune

"The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" By David Mitchell Random House. 479 pp. $26

The British writer David Mitchell’s new novel “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” opens with a miraculous birth, probably a knowing and slightly subversive wink at Christian beliefs, since the religion will be at issue in the pages to follow. It is not a virginal birth but a naturally occurring one in which poor circumstances have a chokehold on the lives of the birthing mother and her child. The miracle will be life.

The birth takes place in the house of a concubine in Japan during its Edo Period of forced isolation, when Christianity was banned, and a western-influenced Japanese doctor is forced to instruct a midwife from behind a curtain — by order, he is not allowed to witness the event or touch the woman. Luckily, the extraordinary midwife recognizes the unusual breech position of the fetus from an engraving in a Dutch medical text her father had been translating from "that enlightened and barbaric realm, Europe."

For long moments, this appears to be an attempt to extract the stillborn son of a Magistrate, the shogun’s representative and therefore the supreme local power before whom all others bow. Amid the concubine’s labor, a celebration can be heard in surrounding Nagasaki, heralding the safe arrival of a ship in service of the Dutch East Indies Company, a closely controlled trading partner whose presence represents economic health for the greater community.

Only when Magistrate Shiroyama’s deputy defies his orders, allowing the doctor to utilize his forceps, is the bleakest outcome avoided. Almost surreptitiously and with great literary economy, Mitchell has delivered many of the elements that will shape the body of this tale as it grows: The midwife, a scholar’s daughter named Orito Aibagawa, is a major character whose reward by the Magistrate (also a major character) will, as an unintended consequence, thrust her into contact with the young Dutch clerk Jacob de Zoet (newly arrived on the ship, he is the central protagonist and the character from whom the novel’s title derives).

Pitted against each other throughout will be xenophobic Japanese practices and westernizing impulses; traditional Shinto and Buddhist beliefs and hidden, forbidden Christianity; emergent scientific consciousness and old superstitions, including the murderously occult; rivals for power and the shogun’s approval; and self-serving Dutchmen jockeying for company power on this far outpost of the VOC, the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, taking direction from faraway Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia). Late in the game, a global geopolitical battle comes to these shores as well, when the captain of a British frigate sails into Nagasaki Bay and attempts to wrest trading rights from the Dutch.

Those familiar with Mitchell’s earlier, pinwheeling novel “Cloud Atlas” may be expecting a globetrotting, time-traveling hybrid to emerge, for that novel mixed genres from travelogue to murder mystery to science fiction, wandering into the post-apocalyptic. Here, multiple story lines exist within a more straightforward structure of time and place, skittering occasionally to South Africa and the South Pacific but sticking mainly to the small Dutch trading factory and warehouses on Dejima, a tiny artificial island just yards offshore in Nagasaki Harbor, and the offices of the Magistrate on the mainland. Mitchell’s myriad characters in this new Tale of Genji — merchants, slaves, spies, interpreters, porters, concubines, company officers and lower hands, a monkey named William Pitt — sit between the end of the eighteenth century and the advent of the nineteenth, with flashbacks to childhoods in northern Europe, to some colonial settings, and to points of origin in other Japanese locales.

Ignore details of story and circumstance, and connections between “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” and “Cloud Atlas” are evident, many of which relate to the nature of belief, to pernicious ideas of racial superiority, to conscience. “Belief is both prize and battlefield, within the mind and in the mind’s mirror, the world,” Mitchell wrote in ending “Cloud Atlas,” and one finds that proposition — call it a perspective — to be the subtle backlight in much of the action in “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.” A noted academic who delivers a lecture on modernizing to his fellow Japanese at Shirando Academy in Nagasaki asks, “What is it that directs the minds of the powerful? The answer is ‘belief.’ [ellipsis] What, then, or where, is the womb of belief?”

The Academy is one answer, but does knowledge alone suffice? The Japanese are at once hungry for it and wary of it. Magistrate Shiroyama, saddened and angered at having discovered great evil in his domain, which may be beyond his power to stop, laments that “The purest believers are the truest monsters.” Doctor Marinus, a learned, harpsichord-playing physician and botanist, one who suffers no fools but is among the novel’s treasures as a character, tells de Zoet that he “finds a certain comfort in humanity’s helplessness.” When pressed to name what he actually believes in — when he and de Zoet face mortal danger — he replies that other than Descartes’ methodology and Scarlatti’s sonatas, “little is actually worthy of either belief or disbelief. Better to strive to coexist than seek to disprove.”

De Zoet, whose red hair unnerves the native Japanese, was sent to Dejima to audit the VOC books in search of irregularities, and sincerely believes in his mission to find the “one version of the truth.” A devout Christian, he was raised by his pastor uncle and has illegally smuggled an old family Psalter into Dejima. The repercussions could have been severe, but the Psalter was left unreported by a friendly interpreter named Ogawa Uzaemon, who inspected Jacob’s books but was far more interested in his edition of Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations,” which he promptly borrowed. De Zoet quickly earns a reputation for honesty, and Dejima’s Chief Unico Vorstenbosch (a crook himself) toasts him as “an honest soul in a swamp of human crocodiles, a sharp quill among the blunt nibs.” Until, of course, de Zoet’s honesty drives Vorstenbosch to rage.

As Mitchell grinds his cultural tectonic plates together, nearly universal graft is the least of it — the novel mushrooms out to include infanticide, kidnapping and murder, and primal betrayals of many sorts. It also embraces a classic love triangle, for de Zoet and Uzaemon love the same woman, although the wise Marinus advises de Zoet, “it is the genus ‘The Oriental Woman’ who so fascinates you.” Part thriller, part love story, part a tale of vengeance achieved at a too-high price, part argument on behalf of humanistic values, still the novel relies on its smaller parts for emotional movement, not its grander gestures.

The razor-sharp character voices that have driven much of Mitchell’s writing are less evident in “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet,” much of their power consigned to occasional meditative comments, or to Mitchell’s liberal use of logical (and humorous) contradictions between a character’s italicized thoughts and what he or she ends up doing in the moment. One exception is a slave who unexpectedly appears in first-person narration, and simply but powerfully debates whether he owns his own name (he decides he does, since he keeps real one secret), or his mind. Again he does, since while he shaves his master, he thinks of slitting the man’s throat, yet “instead of punishing me, he just sits there with his eyes shut.”

The slave considers his mind an island, and complains that it hurts to step off it back to Dejima. Uzaemon, pondering the same existential question, puzzles, “There are times when I suspect the mind has a mind of its own. It shows us pictures. Pictures of the past, and the might-one-day-be. This mind’s mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice.” (Lo and behold, line drawings and engravings float sparely through the pages of the novel.) Marinus answers de Zoet’s question about the soul by saying “The soul is a verb. Not a noun.”

Mitchell has developed a way of allowing the world to speak its own mind, too, almost as if it existed outside the narrative stream. Throughout “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,” he inserts one-liners that approach haiku in their terse form and imagistic content. Sometimes lightly satirical, sometimes ominous, they read as commentary on the action taking place around them, often quite playfully: “Pigeons scuffle and trill in the eaves of the cloisters” is one, “The shadow of a bold rat trots along the oiled paper pane” another. Scuffling and trilling, bold and furtive, the Dutch and Japanese bow to each other on their respective islands and in their respective minds. The captain of the British ship that enters Nagasaki Harbor recalls a mentor of his saying that a well-run ship “is a floating opera,” and if that holds for novels, consider “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” a floating opera too. Lacking arias, it does feature hymns.